The gaffe that wasn't

I've long been of two minds about press coverage of political gaffes. On the one hand, focusing on what Ron Brownstein calls "snowflake stories" — which tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared — deprives our audience of meatier, more relevant stories. On the other, unscripted moments, even trivial ones, often offer a good window into the soul of a candidate or politician.

"Long-term," says Vox's Matthew Yglesias, "the problem here isn't just news consumers find themselves listening to bullshit gaffe stories. It's that politicians learn the same lessons over and over again: unscripted moments are dangerous and generally to be avoided. Don't give interviews and don't stray from talking points."

But Vox, too, covers political gaffes under the guise of explaining why they are relevant and important. In fact, half the stories on its home page yesterday had a gaffe — a moment of unintentional truth — of some sort at their core. Many of these stories are pre-wrapped as media analysis, and then wrapped one more time with a voice of God bow, but hey — they're informative, entertaining, and interesting. Jon Stewart built The Daily Show as much on the backs of gaffe-gating as he did from the scripted fare of cable news, even when he was bemoaning the media's tendency to gaffe-ualize everything.

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We're trapped by one fact of life: some gaffes are not gaffes and don't deserve coverage. Non-gaffe gaffes tend to be exploited as gaffes by partisan tribes because they know how the media works. A better media would resist the temptation to cover everything that's labeled a gaffe as a gaffe. When Obama spoke about assailants "randomly" shooting people in a deli in France, he was not referring to the motive behind the shootings; he was referring to the effect that terrorism makes such an impression because it chooses victims so randomly. He had been asked if the threat of terrorism was exaggerate by the West, and if so, why. The answer, in context, was perfectly reasonably and even "banal," as Yglesias notes.

The partisan right press jumped on the word "random" because it fits in to their paragraphs about how Obama refuses to define the threat by its motivating ideology, political Islam. The mainstream press, for the most part, ignored it until one reporter, ABC's Jonathan Karl, asked Josh Earnest about the phrase at a briefing. One reporter — and suddenly, for a news cycle, the heavens fell.

I know Jon Karl and I've worked with him, and I admire how he uses the briefing platform to antagonize the White House and hold the president accountable. Along with his like-minded former ABC colleague Jake Tapper, he's one of the best White House correspondents in modern memory. This time, though, I think Karl made a mistake. In context, it's perfectly clear what Obama said; Karl should have used more discretion before framing the question. He framed it as though he accepted its premise, and in this case, he shouldn't have.

In Karl's defense, the White House bungled their response to his question and had to clarify itself later in the day. Still, that gaffe wouldn't have gone up the flag pole unless Karl gave it legitimacy.

There's plenty of really terrific open questions about President Obama's counter-terrorism strategy, and Karl has asked many of them. (I really don't want to pick on him; I'm half the reporter today that he was 10 years ago.)

To extricate themselves from having to cover fake gaffes, journalists shouldn't be afraid to tell editors or producers that what MSNBC or Fox is calling a gaffe really isn't, that it shouldn't be covered even though it is generating attention, and then they should fight to not cover it. If that doesn't work, then we should call a spade a spade, unless we suspend the laws of logic, of cause and effect, of context and reason.